"Do you honestly think anyone is going to believe we're a couple?" She wanted to kill him.
"That's up to you, isn't it? I'm serious about you working on looking more pleased about marrying a Sauveterre. We have an image to maintain," he added with a disdainful tilt of his lips.
"Quit making jokes! This isn't funny." Her pulse raced like she was being chased through a dark forest by a pack of wolves. "I am not marrying you."
"No," he agreed, the single word dropping her old hopes like china on concrete. "But you will play the part of my fiancée until the attention on our family dies down."
"Oh, right. When has that ever happened? No, Ramon. I refuse. Go ahead and fire me for insubordination. Make my day."
He folded his arms and leaned his hips on the desk, his expression bored. "Are you done?"
"Are you implying I'm overreacting?" She was trembling, hands fisted at the ends of her tensed arms, entire body twitching with fight or flight. "You're ruining my life."
"Please," he scoffed. "This is your job. You're in front of the cameras all the time, standing next to one of us, making statements that say nothing. It's more of the same."
"It's not. I'm fine as a Sauveterre minion, but I don't want to be the main event!"
"You're not a minion." He drew back a little, sending her an annoyed frown. "You're part of the inner circle. You know that."
"Since when?" His siblings might treat her that way, but he certainly didn't.
"I wouldn't have gone down today's route with anyone else, even if there had been other choices. We trust you. This is obvious by the position you hold. How is this news to you?"
"You trust me?" She refused to let herself believe it. Wouldn't allow it to be important. "After what you said this morning about making my life difficult? Or was it miserable? Either way, you're ticking all the boxes, aren't you?"
He didn't move, but his expression hardened. "Let's talk about how I really ruined your life, shall we? Clearly we have to get that out of the way before you'll be able to act like a grown-up."
No. She felt her throat flex as it closed around a cry of pain, like an arrow speared into her windpipe. Without a word, she spun and headed for the door.
A snick sounded as she approached it. Oh, he had not just locked it. She gave the latch a furious wriggle and yanked on the door, but nothing happened. It was oddly frightening. She didn't fear him exactly, but she was terrified of the feelings he provoked in her. They were always off the scale. And to lock her in and insist she talk about that?
No. Clammy sweat broke out on her forehead. Her hands and feet went icy cold.
She spun to see him behind his desk. His hand came away from a panel that he casually closed so the surface of his desk was smooth and unbroken once again.
"Why are you such a horrible person?"
"You know why. That is what I've been saying." He spoke in a flat, implacable tone. The fact that he didn't deny being reprehensible did nothing to reassure her. He moved to the wet bar near the sitting area and pulled out a bottle of anise. "Your preferred spirit, I believe?"
She didn't answer, thinking it strange that he would know that. It was a common drink in Spain, though. It was probably a lucky guess. He poured them each a glass.
"You know our family history, Isidora. You played with my sisters when they had forgotten how. You visited Trella when she imprisoned herself in Sus Brazos. You showed a preference for me when every other girl on the planet couldn't tell me apart from my brother and didn't bother to try. Come. Sit."
She stayed stubbornly by the locked door, arms folded, face on fire. She stood there and hated him for knowing how infatuated she had been. For talking about it like it was some cute, childish memory. Nostalgia for a first pet.
Most of all, she hated him for making her stand here and relive the morning when two of her most painful experiences collided and became an utterly unbearable one.
He leaned to set her drink on a side table and sipped his own, remaining standing, flinty gaze fixed on her resentful expression.
"I was flattered, but I couldn't take you seriously. You were too young."
She had known that. Eight years was a big gap and aside from a handful of boyish pursuits, he and his brother had always been beyond their years. Their sister's kidnapping when they were fifteen had very quickly matured them, then their father's early death had forced them to take control of an international investment corporation at twenty-one. They had been carrying tremendous responsibility for a decade. In many ways, Ramon was still too old for her.
"I don't care that you never wanted to date me." Lie. She cared. His disinterest had been demoralizing. "What I can't forgive is that you slept with my mother."
"I didn't sleep with her," he growled.
She snorted and looked away, working to keep her face noncommittal while she was dying inside, aching to believe that, but she wasn't stupid. The fact he would lie to her face about it made it even worse.
"Did you ask her?" he prompted.
"No!" As if she wanted details about any of the men her mother slept with, most especially him. "I didn't have to, did I? The evidence spoke for itself."
"The evidence," he repeated, tone light yet dangerous, increasing her tension.
"You were half-dressed, wearing a night's stubble, and the hood of your car was cold. It doesn't take a forensic scientist to figure out where you spent the night."
"I've never denied spending the night."
"In her bed. Two pillows were used. I looked."
"I reclined on her bed while she changed and removed her makeup. We were talking. Nothing happened. We went back downstairs and drank enough that I decided to sleep it off on the sofa. I woke when I heard you come in. I tried to tell you this at your father's birthday. You walked away."
"Oh, please. Once she realized I'd come home, she didn't say, 'Oh, by the way, Ramon spent the night, but it was completely innocent.' She asked how long I'd been there and looked guilty as hell."
"That-" He pointed at her. "That is the real evidence, isn't it? You don't think your mother can't bring a man home without making love with him."
True, but that was such a complex issue for her, she refused to go there.
"You've hit a hard limit, Ramon. The way my mother lives is not up for discussion. I will walk. And that's not why I think you're the scum of the earth."
His head went back as though the cold iron in her tone caught his attention. After a brief pause, he said, "If you're thinking I'm the one who can't spend a night with a woman and not have sex, you're wrong."
He was talking about Trella, she supposed. Her friend's struggle with anxiety was something that turned Isidora inside out every single time she thought about it, but she refused to let herself soften with empathy. To give him the benefit of the doubt.
"You want me to believe that's what you were doing that night?" She burned afresh with outrage and scorn. "Letting my mother cry on your shoulder? Then why didn't you say so when we met in the lounge? I asked you what you were doing there and you said she had been looking for company so you came home with her. You knew what I took from that. You knew exactly what I was thinking. If you didn't have sex with her, why did you let me believe you did?"
"Because you were eighteen and still carrying a torch." His voice was a sledgehammer. "It had to stop."
This moment was every bit as hard a hit as that moment had been, completely destroying any shred of hope she might have clung to. For a few seconds, she couldn't breathe. The agony was that all-encompassing.
She wasn't still carrying a torch, was she? She would swear she hadn't been.
Until he had kissed her. Something tentative had begun playing in the back of her mind in the last hour, though. She was waiting for time alone to relive that kiss and properly savor it. To build it into something it would never become.
How pathetic.
He was right. This childish yearning had to stop.
As the silence lengthened, something tickled her cheek. She wiped at it, discovering it was a tear.
He released a heavy sigh, which scored, speaking as it did of his impatience with her intense feelings where he was concerned.
She was equally exhausted by it herself. She really was.
Last one, she vowed. That was the last tear she would ever cry over this man.
Because it didn't matter if he had slept with her mother or not. What he was telling her, then and now, was that he would never be interested in her. Not as anything but a fake fiancée. A prop for one of his PR tricks.
She had to move on.
She nodded with understanding, feeling disconnected from her body. The muscles around her mouth twitched and she thought she might be trying to smile, but it was the kind that came when the tragedy was too great for any other emotion but laughter at how punishing life could be.